"I don't hold my breath when I'm hiding from an enemy because they barely look for me. Nothing feels like a close call, just success or failure. I don't feel the threats in front of me, even when they kill me. I'm not being hunted. Instead, I walk in and out of a hunting ground for short periods of time."
"gives you bigger areas to explore than Tarsier's previous games, but does nothing with all that extra space. Rooms are deeper, and there are wider outdoor areas to run in. You dock onto small beaches, walk through an abandoned playground, and race across an open field, to name a few. It sells you spectacle but doesn't deliver on gameplay. In the opening hours, I wasted a lot of time running around looking for surprises, interactables, and collectibles. It wasn't worth it."
"Often when I'm running through a grassy lot, going down a decrepit hallway, or checking the edges of a room, it turns out to be for nothing. And when I am rewarded, it feels more like a happenstance than a discovery because for every time my instincts were right, there were many more times they were wrong. And as much as I love the cosmetic masks you can find if you poke around, it just wasn't worth it after a certain point."
The game presents a beautifully rendered haunted-house environment with larger rooms and wider outdoor areas but fails to justify the extra space with meaningful gameplay. Enemy AI rarely searches thoroughly, turning stealth encounters into binary outcomes of success or failure rather than tense hunts. Exploration yields cosmetic masks, concept art, statues, coffins, and other secrets, but many rewards feel accidental and not worth the time spent searching. Early segments encourage aimless wandering for interactables and collectibles, often yielding nothing. The design abandons previous strengths without introducing compelling new mechanics, leaving spectacle without satisfying interactivity.
Read at Kotaku
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